Despite new-found profitability, Twitter’s growth flatlines

It’s the medium of choice for the President of the United States. It’s hashtags literally define the emerging zeitgeist. It’s stock price is at a two-year apex, the company finally profitable.

But for the last two quarters, Twitter has flat-lined. After breaking the 300 million monthly user barrier in 2015, the platform’s growth has gone soft.

Analysis by Statista suggests Twitter may be falling behind other platforms that have become multi-dimensional services. “When people think of Facebook as a company, they mostly think of it synonymously with Facebook the social network. However, Facebook Inc. is much more than that, as today’s chart nicely illustrates. With WhatsApp, Instagram and of course the namesake Facebook and Messenger, the company owns four of the world’s largest social media / messaging services. Facebook alone is used by more than 2 billion people per month and both WhatsApp and Messenger also passed the billion-user milestone in 2016. Tencent, the Chinese company behind WeChat and Qzone might also boast a billion users in total, but it still doesn’t come close to matching Facebook’s global footprint.” Twitter doesn’t have the breadth of use of Facebook’s family of apps.

What all of these services have in common is their immense attractiveness to advertisers. Not only do they all boast hundreds of millions of users, but they also have the ability to target specific groups based on likes, dislikes and past behavior. That is why social media advertising has grown immensely over the past few years. In the U.S. alone, social media ad revenue is expected to reach $23.8 billion this year, with more growth to come in 2019 and beyond. You will find more infographics at Statista